PLUTUS: Leveraging Location-Based Social Networks to Recommend Potential Customers to Venues

Mohamed Sarwat, Ahmed Eldawy, Mohamed F. Mokbel, John Riedl
2013 2013 IEEE 14th International Conference on Mobile Data Management  
In a business setting, the customer value is crucial as it determines how much it is worth spending to acquire a particular customer. Viral marketing techniques leverages social ties among users to help advertising a particular product. Recently, as mobile devices (e.g., smart phones, GPS devices) became ubiquitous, location-based social networking websites (e.g., Gowalla, BrightKite, Foursquare) are getting more and more popular. Along with location-based social networking services being
more » ... ent, new kind of data came into play besides the traditional social networking data: (1) Spatial data: represents the users geo-locations, venues geo-locations and information about users visiting different venues. (2) Users Opinions data: represents how much a user likes the venues she visits (e.g., Alice visited restaurant A and gave it a rating of five over five). In this paper, we present PLUTUS; a framework that assists venues (e.g., restaurant, gym, shopping mall) owners in growing their business. To recommend the best set of customers, PLUTUS takes three main aspects into consideration: (1) Social aspect, (2) Spatial aspect, and (3) Users opinions aspect. To this end, PLUTUS proposes two main algorithms: (1) Profit Calculation: It is responsible of calculating the total profit that a user u may add to a venue v taking into account the social, spatial, and user opinions aspects. (2) Profit Maximization: This algorithm is used to maximize the total profit of a given venue. We evaluated PLUTUS using real data set extracted from an existing Locationbased Social Networking website, Foursquare. The results show that Plutus achieves higher estimated profit and more efficient profit calculation than naive marketing algorithms.
doi:10.1109/mdm.2013.13 dblp:conf/mdm/SarwatEMR13 fatcat:cnjirbkxljhetm5jfhrwiuomnq